I just picked up the game about a week ago, I know I'm late to the party but now it's like crack.

I'm filled with questions but will limit myself to this one for now.

When you play at a setting lower than legendary, when you go to do crafting/selling/non-combat activities, is it wise to up the difficulty to legendary as you'd get more xp?

Thanks in advance.

Changing the difficulty to a higher setting will increase the XP you gain from numerous activities. Enjoy your game.

Actually no, I don't believe it does. Difficulty settings only change damage dealt and damage taken. The only skills that that affects are combat skills. At higher difficulties your armor skill increases faster because you take more damage but your attack skills increase slower because you deal less damage and vice versa on lower difficulties. It doesn't change the cost of items which is the determining factor on how fast your crafting skills increase. More costly items level you more, novice or legendary it will increase the same.

I'm pretty sure it doesn't change anything with crafting.

Cool, thanks for the swift responses.

Yeah, changing the difficulty only directly affects damage done / taken. i.e. The higher the difficulty, the lower the multiplier on your damage done and the higher the multiplier on your damage taken / enemy damage done to you.

Here is a table with the difficulty modifiers,

Difficulty /Player Damage Dealt / Player Damage Taken
Novice / 2x /0.5x
Apprentice / 1.5x/ 0.75x
Adept / 1x /1x
Expert / 0.75x / 1.5x
Master / 0.5x / 2x
Legendary / 0.25x/ 3x

Damage taken

Exp gained is only related to base damage, say a bandit does 10 and a draugr does 15, the draugr will level up your Defensive skills much faster per hit than the bandit.

Damage delt

Lets say Attack A does 5 damage and Attack B does 10 damage, Attack B will gain much more exp per hit for your Offensive Skills

Following this formula exp in these catagories, Offensive and Defensive,

On legendary difficulty, the player deals less damage, thus getting more exp out of one enemy because you maximize the number of hits.

On novice, the player takes the least amount of damage, so the player gets as many hits as desired for the lowest risk.

I learned something today.

There are XPgain modifiers in the game: 1.25x for expert and 1.5x for master. What I don't know, is if they actually work -haven't bothered to test them.

Legendary has no modifier associated. I tried to add one at some point, but the Creation Kit rejected it upon loading the plugin. This propably means they're hardcoded. I suppose SKSE could've been of help here.